Alive with possibility -- Version 2.0.0.8

Having just been kakked out by Chris Marais, one of the greatest writers/photographers South Africa has ever produced, for being a depressing scaremonger, the time is ripe to blog things right.

But lest julle almal think Mr Hyde has just turned into Dr Jekyll, or the lion has found his courage, or the tin man has found a brain, or the scarecrow’s found a heart — or I’m being paid a moer of a lot of bucks by Yvonne Johnston — let me assure you that this is the same dislocated, discombobulated, disillusioned doos that’s been dissing most things South African since my first blog.

Or at least not all things South African. There’s a lot I like about this land. My bare feet have sampled most of the South African soil types. I dig our rocks and have started my own collection. I really smaak birds, have a lifelist of 436 species and can identify 88 by their calls and 37 by their nests. I’m learning about South Africa’s grasses, trees (they’re tough), shrubs, butterflies, moths and insects. I can recognise most of our snakes enough to know when to move very slowly. I don’t know much about fish, though I once had dreams of becoming a marine biologist (had to make do with one as a girlfriend at Rhodes instead).

I’ve eaten most of the edible stuff this country has to offer and sampled (that’s a euphemism!) every indigenous potable liquid. I will hopefully die in South Africa. One day. That’s why one of the Seven Goals of 2008 is to secure my own piece of this land. Forever.

And while there are exceptions, it’s mostly people and their bullshit that piss me off. Hey, I’m no paragon of virtue, role model for the masses or most of the good things I admire. I have done many wicked, evil, heinous things I regret. So I guess I’m just an ordinary guy — like it says in the autobiographical schpiel to the right.

I am an African to the dust between my toes. I love this country with a deep, deep passion in every way I can be honest about. And it is true that this place is alive with possibility — that’s why it riles me so to see those possibilities squandered, hidden, abused, hoarded, stolen, destroyed by thieves and knaves and vagabonds, charlatans, shits and yahoos in any guise from police chief to president, or philanthropist to philanderer.

If I didn’t love this place, if I didn’t think it was worth fighting for, do you think I’d spend so much effort writing about it?

But, yes, I am scared and sad and disappointed, Chris, because I see idiocy where wisdom should prevail; I see hatred that’s deserved, but that has spawned more hatred in return. And I see the little guy, the mischief-making maverick, mauled and mangled by the mindless masses.

Leonard Cohen wrote an archetypal song for every wayward exile, poet and prophet in his or her own homeland and called it Democracy. He sang about the US, but I took only a pinch of poetic licence and my version goes like this:

It’s coming through a hole in the air
From those nights in John Vorster Square
It’s coming from the feel
That it ain’t exactly real
Or it’s real, but it ain’t exactly there
From the wars against disorder
From the sirens night and day
From the fires of the homeless
From the ashes of the gray
Democracy is coming to the RSA

It’s coming through a crack in the wall
On a visionary flood of alcohol
From the staggering account
Of the Sermon on the Mount
Which I don’t pretend to understand at all
It’s coming from the silence
In the dock at Table Bay
From the brave, the bold, the battered
Heart of every other day
Democracy is coming to the RSA

It’s coming from the sorrow in the street
From the holy places where the races meet
From the homicidal bitchin’
That goes down in every kitchen
To determine who will serve and who will eat
From the wells of disappointment
Where the women kneel to pray
For the grace of God in ghettoes here
And mansions far away
Democracy is coming to the RSA

CHORUS
Sail on, sail on
O mighty Ship of State!
To the Shores of Need
Past the Reefs of Greed
Through the Squalls of Hate
Sail on, sail on, sail on …

It’s coming to South Africa first
The cradle of the best and the worst
It’s here we got the need
And the leaderless to lead
And it’s here we’ve got the spiritual thirst
It’s here the family’s broken
And it’s here the hungry say
That the heart has got to open
In a fundamental way
Democracy is coming to the RSA

It’s coming from the women and the men
O baby, we’ll be making love again
We’ll be going down so deep
That the dust is going to weep
And the mountain’s going to shout amen!
It’s coming like the viral flood
Beneath the needles’ sway
Imperial, mysterious
In amorous array
Democracy is coming to the RSA

CHORUS
I’m patriotic, if you know what I mean
I love the country but I can’t stand the scene
And I’m neither left nor right
I’m just staying home tonight
Flat-lining to that hopeless little screen
But I’m stubborn as those plastic bags
That time cannot decay
I’m junk but I’m still holding up
This little wild bouquet
Democracy is coming to the RSA

Yeah, that about says it.

Here at the gate of 2008 I suppose our job is to take those ethereal possibilities and make probabilities out of them. We cannot trust our rulers or controllers or deciders-of-nations’-fates to do that and we cannot look for models elsewhere on this fantastic, fabled, fucked-up continent. Any ideas?